The Ethics of Film Restoration - Text 6
The addition of bogus “soundtracks” to silent films (marching soldiers, roaring crowds, train and car engines) finds no resistance from lending institutions with not enough time, personnel, and political clout to prevent the systematic breaches to the ethics of film preservation they otherwise promote in festivals and conferences. Observing this phenomenon as an organic process inherent to cinema, rather than as a mere victory of the marketplace over culture, can mitigate the vertigo effect derived from its widespread application to the relics of film history – but the last part of this parcours will elaborate on that special relation between film preservation and industry.
A plausible explanation for the urge to improve what is defective is that cinema itself is a very pliable form of artistic expression. Its innate flexibility is comparable to that of music and oral literature. Monteverdi’s opera L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) survives in two very different versions, neither of which includes all the instrumental parts. There are so many variations on the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata (presumably crafted over more than a millennium, between the eighth century BCE and the fourth ACE) that no critical edition can be called definitive. Silent films have morphed over the years, too, for so many reasons and to such an extent that curators and scholars are sometimes unsure about their true identity. Their mutation continues to this day, even in those places – the archive, the museum – where the metamorphosis should be slowed down.
All in all, film preservation confronts a dual test dictated by history: from a diachronic perspective – the unfolding in time of photographs projected in sequence – a preserved film like print 36 in our fictional case study could be “incomplete” in the sense that some images recorded by one of the camera negatives are no longer there. Should another print or a negative of another generation be found somewhere, reintegrating the visual content that is missing in a new combined film element would be part of the preservation work. In its synchronic approach – each photographic frame considered as a discrete visual unit, closely related to the adjacent ones – the goal could be to remove the effects of the mechanical damage inflicted upon the print, and at least some of the harm suffered by its previous generations. A third test, emanating from film preservation’s own ethical standards, is giving film history more material to dwell upon.
